Would you favor an increase in the sales tax that would raise $700 million a year to fund incentives for businesses to convert to electric vehicles?

The staff of the South Coast Air Quality Management District is worried that you won’t. That’s why they’re polling right now to find the magic words that will make you say you support a quarter-cent sales tax hike in Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and Orange counties.

The staff members are paid a lot of money — the SCAQMD has about 800 employees and spends over $100 million per year on salaries and benefits — to figure out how to squeeze money out of hard-pressed Californians, who have already been juiced like a lime at a margarita festival.

The agency hired a polling firm that may be ringing your phone at this very moment with questions like this one:

“Would you favor or oppose the state legislature giving the AQMD the authority to seek voter approval of a ballot measure to raise funds at the local level in order to fund grants and other financial incentives to encourage the development and use of zero and near-zero emission vehicles to reduce emissions from cars, heavy-duty diesel trucks and other mobile sources of air pollution?”

That’s question 20 in the poll, which you can read for yourself in the publicly released agenda of the February 12 special meeting of the SCAQMD’s Legislative Committee.

Note the choice of words: “raise funds at the local level” sounds so friendly, almost like a bake sale for the Cub Scouts. Who could be against that?

Orange County Supervisor Shawn Nelson raised an objection. He was irritated with the too-clever effort to bury the word “tax” so far down in the lengthy poll’s questions that only an insomniac would still be awake to hear it.

San Bernardino County Supervisor Janice Rutherford also voted no on the motion to proceed with the poll.

But Nelson and Rutherford were outvoted 3-2. Committee members Clark E. Parker Sr., William A. Burke and Mayor Pro Tem Judith Mitchell of Rolling Hills Estates voted to proceed with the “Issues Survey.” The plan, if the plot to increase the sales tax polls well, is to rush to Sacramento in time for this Friday’s deadline for the introduction of a “spot bill.”

“Spot bills” are blank pieces of legislation that are passed by the Assembly and the Senate even though they have no language in them at all, other than a single sentence such as, “A bill related to the budget.” Later, these blank bills are “amended” with language that enacts some backroom deal. The “amended” bill is then brought to the floor of each chamber for an up-or-down vote — no hearings, no debate, no further amendments.

The SCAQMD doesn’t currently have the authority to put a sales tax increase on the ballot. State law would have to be changed. A “spot bill” is the world’s sneakiest way to do it.

If the “spot bill” gambit fails, the staff’s Plan B is a “gut-and-amend.”

That’s another Sacramento trick play. A bill that is non-controversial and unnoticed is brought to the floor, “gutted” of all its language, and amended into an entirely new bill. Then a final vote is held as soon as possible, without any committee hearings.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District is trying to raise $1 billion per year for the next 14 years to “incentivize” businesses to convert to electric vehicles, a costly goal that is required by a plan written by the SCAQMD itself. The “2016 Air Quality Management Plan” is arguably less about air quality than it is about bureaucrats enforcing rules written by other bureaucrats, thereby keeping all the bureaucrats permanently employed at generous salaries.

To pay for incentives to buy electric vehicles, the staff’s 2016 “action plan” suggested a $20 hike in the DMV’s auto registration fee to raise $240 million, a “mileage-based user fee” to raise $1.04 billion, a penny-per-gallon tax increase on gasoline to raise $72 million, a property-tax surcharge, a cargo-container fee and an increase in the sales tax.

Now the challenge for the highly-paid staff and their highly-paid polling firm is to figure out how to get lawmakers in Sacramento and voters in Southern California to go along with it.

If you get a call from the SCAQMD’s pollsters asking your opinion, be sure to answer the phone and let them have it.

Susan Shelley is an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group. Reach her at Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter: @Susan_Shelley.

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